Carr driven to accept Gillard’s offer

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announces that former NSW premier Bob Carr will join her government as a senator for NSW and Foreign Minister at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra on Friday March 2.
Photo: Andrew Meares

by
Pamela Williams

Soon after 10pm on Thursday last week, a spectral figure moved through the lobby of the Hotel Realm in Canberra.

He carried a travel suit-pack which he lifted high to carefully conceal his face as he stepped – incognito – towards the elevator. If it seemed like a moment of slapstick, he could not be too careful in a city teeming with media. And so it was that
Bob Carr
came to Canberra.

The following day Carr would accompany Australia’s beaming if accident-prone Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
to a stage where the thespian denouement of a week-long drama would unfold. Carr, the saviour, would help put Gillard’s leadership of her party and the government back on track. It was a moment in which the highbrow Carr revelled, aware of his star power and his lead-actor status as both incoming foreign minister and dragon-killer.

Moreover, his return to politics after a hiatus of many years was a triumphal blast from the bastion of the NSW ALP Right machine. More than any other, Carr was their man.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith, who actively sought a return to the foreign affairs portfolio he relinquished when Kevin Rudd took up the position after being removed as prime minister.
Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

If the story of Carr’s drafting to Canberra came freighted with history, it also captured a ghastly week in Gillard’s long run of bad luck and poor judgements. Even her savage triumph over former foreign minister
Kevin Rudd
had ended up overshadowed as the renowned NSW Right strong-man
Mark Arbib
announced his own departure from politics. Making it clear he was sick of the blood-letting of which he had been an integral part, Arbib announced he wanted more time for his family and a chance to cauterise the party wounds.

It was Arbib’s departure that would dramatically spark yet a new line of dirty washing on display, almost fatally damaging Gillard in the process.

But by last Thursday evening, Gillard had retrieved her position, recognising that, in Bob Carr, she had a chance to upend the news cycle while recruiting from outside a supernova, with whom none inside her government could compete.

Carr though would have to keep his head down if Gillard was to ambush the press. There could be no leaks. In a strategy worthy of a crime novel, Gillard’s chief of staff, Ben Hubbard, insisted Carr be spirited to Canberra by road – there must be no airports, no accidental publicity to blow the story before Gillard unveiled her coup.

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Carr left his Sydney home on Thursday evening during a tumultuous rainstorm, climbed into the former premier’s car he remained entitled to, with his driver and wife Helena, and turned towards Canberra. The journey took this former premier of NSW and luminary of the Labor Right faction to the heart of power. It was a drive replete with dreams, and it was the beginning of the end-game in Carr’s long flirtation with federal politics.

During the drive Carr received phone briefings from Gillard’s foreign affairs policy adviser, Richard Maude. He returned a call, too, from former diplomat Dick Woolcott. The pair had a long conversation about Australia’s UN Security Council bid without Woolcott realising Carr was now destined for Canberra.

Carr phoned his former speech writer Bob Ellis as well. Ellis was on the train to Adelaide, and the two old friends pondered the right words Carr might use should he be writing an article about the crazed events of the week gone by. Later Carr would joke about the calls to journalists, entertained by the cloak and dagger Hubbard had concocted.

When they pulled up before the Hotel Realm, Helena Carr checked in while Carr remained in the vehicle with the windows up. Only at the last moment, when there was nothing left to do but make it from the car to the elevator, did Carr emerge to enter, hiding his face behind his bag.

For Carr, the roller-coaster had begun four days earlier in the bastion of the NSW Right machine, an organisation which giveth and which also taketh away.

On Monday February 27, Arbib, the uncompromising whatever-it-takes former NSW party boss, maker-and-slayer of premiers and prime ministers, now federal sports minister and advocate for low-income housing and indigenous advancement, called the NSW party secretary Sam Dastyari to tell him he planned to resign that day. That morning Gillard had soundly thumped Rudd in a ballot which had riven the party with a show of venom and vindictiveness on all sides, the like of which no one alive in politics could recall. Federal Treasurer
Wayne Swan
alone had iced the cake.

Arbib told Dastyari that he would resign straight after question time on Monday. Dastyari, a man with all the buoyant ambition of his faction and his youth, and with the lineage of Peter Barron, a master tactician from the Hawke government days, as his father-in-law, immediately contacted Carr.

This former premier had publicly nursed an ambition for Canberra, never fulfilled. He was a Renaissance man with a taste for the larger world – and there were now two big vacancies in the government – Arbib’s Senate spot and Rudd's foreign ministry slot. Dastyari, who had worked on Carr’s staff for exactly one day before Carr resigned as premier in August 2005, knew him well. And it was Dastyari’s job to find NSW candidates. He called Carr’s office and made an appointment to see Carr during question time. Carr was now a consultant to Macquarie Bank, a blogger, speech-maker and campaigner on myriad issues. But the political bug bites hard. Dastyari could sound Carr out while Arbib was on air quitting. Given the symmetry of it all, this time there might be a chance Carr could be talked into it.

As it happened, Arbib delayed his announcement. By the time he appeared on the TV screen, Dastyari and assistant ALP NSW secretary Chris Minns had arrived at Carr’s Bligh St Sydney offices. “Mark Arbib’s resigning right now," Dastyari told Carr.

As it turned out, after all the years and all the twists and turns of his career, Carr was interested. But he made it clear that the portfolio was the key, and what he was interested in was foreign affairs. Dastyari hastily contacted Gillard’s office, a phone call that would precipitate a week of Labor back-biting and positioning.

For her part, the Prime Minister was entitled to believe that after a ghastly few months she had secured a lull with her defeat of Rudd that morning. By day’s end, she had spoken several times to Carr. “There were clearly conversations between the Prime Minister and Carr that gave him the impression that he was getting Foreign Affairs," one minister said this week. This was Carr’s price. Gillard did some letting-down on Monday night too, telling Defence Minister
Stephen Smith
that he could no longer expect a return to Foreign Affairs – the portfolio he had relinquished for Kevin Rudd. Smith had expected to return to Foreign Affairs with Rudd gone.

Simon Crean
, long regarded as a Gillard man, was expecting Defence in Smith’s place. Now everyone would have to stand still. Gillard told others too that Carr was coming to Canberra.

In the Victorian Right it was clear that the NSW branch, the mighty Right machine, had leapt back to prominence, and that was after a split over support for Gillard versus Rudd just hours before.

And with that, the leaks against the glamazon candidate from Sydney began. The party bucked up against Gillard.

The next morning, February 28,
Wayne Swan
phoned Carr. Swan had bad news. Everything was now dependent on Gillard persuading Smith to relinquish his claim on the Foreign Minister’s job. And Smith was not budging. Carr might have assumed that the Prime Minister would get her way, but as Swan explained, it was not to be. Insiders say Swan was acting at Gillard’s behest, but his close friendship with Smith gave rise to other theories.

In any case, if any two government ministers understood Labor’s factional sword play and the system of owe-and-due as well as those from the NSW machine, it was Smith and Swan.

Smith was a former machine man himself, a state secretary of the West Australian ALP in the late 1980s before he joined the staff of Paul Keating – later helping Keating to build the numbers to destroy Bob Hawke’s prime ministership.

Swan had travelled the other way, starting as an adviser to former Labor leader
Bill Hayden
(himself knocked off by Hawke). Swan became state secretary of the Queensland ALP in the early 1990s with his factional bloc from the transcendant union powerhouse, the Australian Workers’ Union. They were known as the glimmer twins, and later, as The Roosters with Victorian factional head-kicker
Stephen Conroy
as they backed the leadership of
Kim Beazley
with the ferocity of, well, head-kickers.

Suddenly last week, these power-brokers from Queensland, WA and Victoria were faced with not just the living legend Bob Carr, but with a revitalised NSW machine in victory. Had Gillard built the authority in her party that leaders generally do, it seemed inconceivable that Smith could have stared down the Prime Minister. But the year or more in the job had weakened Gillard. Two weeks ago, she was seen as waiting for the knife. Rudd was not the only candidate with hopes afoot.

After the call from Swan, Carr phoned Dastyari on Tuesday at 10.15am. Carr had been booked to fly to Canberra that morning for the big announcement, but with Swan’s advice that Smith would not step aside, it was all off.

Almost as soon, the leaks found their way to the surface when TheSydney Morning Herald reported online the big news on Carr. Dastyari tweeted his disappointment, trying to keep things transparent. Carr declared he was not pursuing the Senate seat, and Gillard walked head first into two days of sheer mayhem. She would deny the reports and declare that no one should believe a story on the Carr push published by The Australian newspaper. “I don’t know why she couldn’t just come out and be honest," said one depressed insider. The party had gone from the jaws of defeat to the jaws of defeat in one awful week.

If Gillard had looked stronger by Monday morning, she looked shellacked – all but finished off, by Wednesday evening. Amid accusations that she had lied, Gillard had no choice – to save herself she had to change the news cycle; and to do that, she had to stare down Smith and others.

On Thursday March 1, Sydneysiders flocked through blinding rain to the Opera House to The Magic Flute. By then Gillard had found a high note of her own, and this time she held it. Late on Thursday morning Carr was at home writing an essay to be published in the next day’s Australian Financial Review.

Gillard phoned him to say “the job’s yours". After the week of humiliation for all concerned, now it was back in front of Carr. Given the circumstances, he immediately said yes. Still there was a critical element. Gillard wanted to take the media by surprise. Her office planned Carr’s trip by road, a journey that went unremarked by any media organisation. Few ministers were put in the picture after the leaks at the start of the week. Swan though, was in the tent. The next morning, Friday March 2, Carr left the Realm, headed for The Lodge and from there to Parliament House with Gillard. He might have been written off two days before; now he was a trophy.

For the factions, the Carr appointment would become an unresolved complication. Arbib might be gone, but NSW appeared to have a new machine strongman in Dastyari and its own candidate in the swing-seat with Carr.

“It looks like we finally have an adult in government," commented one Right-winger this week. He did not mean Gillard.

The NSW party made its pride obvious. “Bob’s Back," boasted the website for NSW Labor, adorned with a handsome blue-hued photo of Carr in his political prime.